Summary
Twyla narrates the story, beginning with how she came to St. Bonaventure’s (St. Bonny’s) because her mother danced all night and Roberta came because her mother was sick. Usually, there are four girls to a room, but in their case, it was just the two of them; they switch beds every night for the four months they are there.
When they first meet, Twyla is not in a good state of mind. She had just been taken from her mother and stuck here with a girl of a different race, and her mother’s words about people of that race never washing their hair and smelling funny seem true. Twyla tells the woman in charge, whom they call Big Bozo, that her mother would not like her being here. Big Bozo shrugs and says that this is good: maybe she will come and take Twyla home.
Roberta does not laugh, and Twyla is glad. After Big Bozo leaves, Roberta asks if Twyla’s mother is sick too, and when Twyla replies that she dances all night, Roberta nods with understanding.
They become fast friends. They look like salt and pepper, yes, but they both get F's and ignore the teacher. Roberta cannot read, but she is good at jacks.
They both were dumped there; all the other kids have no parents. They wish they were “real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky.” The other kids generally ignore them.
St. Bonny’s isn’t so bad. The older girls, who wear makeup, fight, and are mean, fascinate Roberta and Twyla. They listen to the radio, dance, and try to pinch the younger girls.
Twyla dreams of the orchard at St. Bonny’s often. There are hundreds of little twisted trees there—but nothing happened there, so she doesn’t know why she dreams of it.
Maggie is a “sandy-colored” deaf and mute woman who works in the kitchen. She has “legs like parentheses” and always wears a “really awful little hat.” Roberta and Twyla are fascinated by her and call mean things after her to see if she can hear, but it seems that she cannot.
It is the day before Maggie falls down that Roberta and Twyla hear their mothers are coming to visit; they will be there for chapel and then lunch. They are excited and curl each other’s hair.
Big Bozo comes to get them and brings them downstairs to their mothers. On the way, Twyla excitedly spills her Easter basket. She sees other visitors waiting, but these orphans don’t have real families, so these visitors are (1) grandmothers, (2) old women who want servants, or (3) creepy pedophiles.
Twyla sees Mary, her mother, and is embarrassed at first for her tight pants and ratty fur jacket—but she is pretty, and that makes Twyla happy. She hugs her, even though Mary calls out, “Twyla, baby. Twyla, baby!”, and the others mock it.
Roberta taps Twyla’s shoulder and Twyla looks up to see a large woman with a large cross. Mary sticks her hand out, but Roberta refuses it. Mary calls her a bitch as she walks away, and everyone stares.
Throughout the sermon, Twyla seethes at her mother, especially when she sees that Mary didn’t bring any food for them for lunch. At lunch, Roberta’s mother has a feast for her daughter, which seems wrong since Roberta didn’t like to eat much; to Twyla, “the wrong food is always with the wrong people.”
Roberta leaves in May and Twyla is worried that she will die without her. She knows there will be another dumped kid in the room. Roberta promises to write but doesn’t, since she can’t read or write, and gradually she fades from Twyla’s memory.
***
Twyla is working the counter at the Howard Johnson’s and thinks it is a decent job. The place even looks okay at night—like a shelter—but she really loves when the sun breaks in.
A large bus is unloading its crowd, and Twyla is busy pouring coffee. She turns around and sees a woman, whom she recognizes, sitting with two men. The woman has big, wild hair, bracelets, skimpy clothing, and lots of makeup. Twyla wonders if Roberta will remember her.
She walks over and says hello; it takes a moment, but Roberta smiles and says hello back. Roberta asks if she lives here in Newburgh; when Twyla replies that she does, Roberta shares a laugh with the two men. Twyla feels awkward.
Roberta lights a cigarette and says they’re going to see Hendrix. Twyla asks what “she” is doing now and the others all laugh, incredulous that she doesn’t know who Jimi Hendrix is. Stung, Twyla asks Roberta how her mother is. Roberta swallows, says that she's fine, and repeats the question. Twyla says “pretty as a picture” and walks away.
***
Twyla marries James, a kind man with a loud, large family. The family had always lived in Newburgh and knew everything about it. Newburgh is changing now, though, as a surge of wealthy people associated with the computer industry is moving in. Twyla hears of a new Food Emporium opening and decides to check it out.
She is in line when a voice calls out to her. Twyla sees a sharply dressed woman and, after a moment, recognizes Roberta. Roberta signals to her to meet her outside. Twyla cannot forget Roberta’s rudeness last time.
Roberta looks sleek, elegant, and well-dressed. Twyla is curious as to how she got from Hendrix to living in Annandale and looking like that.
They talk for a few minutes. Twyla says she is married and has one boy. Roberta says she is married, too, and has four stepkids. Roberta asks her to have coffee; Twyla thinks ruefully about the melting Klondike bars and scolds herself for buying useless things.
She sets her things in the limousine that drives Roberta around. Twyla smiles about what Big Bozo would think, and both giggle. Suddenly it is like it was when they were kids.
They walk into a coffee shop and Twyla wonders why they are happy to see each other this time and not before. They were only friends for four months when they were kids, but maybe “it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions.”
They sit and fall into recollections of Easter baskets, their mothers, and how, when they last met, Twyla was a “small-town country waitress” and Roberta was a “small-town country dropout.”
As they are discussing Roberta’s husband, a man who works with “computers and stuff,” Twyla sighs that the days at St. Bonny’s are so clear. She remembers when Maggie fell down and the older girls, the “gar girls,” laughed at her. To Twyla’s surprise, Roberta says that Maggie did not fall: the gar girls pushed her and tore her clothes. Also, she adds, Bozo was fired. Twyla is shocked. Roberta explains that she was sent back for a few months when she was ten and then again when she was fourteen, which is how she knew about the firing.
Roberta says Twyla is blocking out the memory with Maggie. Twyla tries to change the subject even though this troubles her. She asks Roberta whom she roomed with.
Suddenly, Twyla wants to go home. She can’t pretend that everything is okay—not after that Howard Johnson’s snub. She asks Roberta abruptly if she was on drugs that day. Roberta shrugs and says that she wasn’t really into drugs; she asks why Twyla asks that. Twyla says Roberta didn’t seem to want to know her then. Roberta replies that, back in those days, the black-white thing was hard.
This is odd to Twyla, who thought it was the opposite. She remembers busloads of white and black people coming to the restaurant and hanging out together. She wonders if remembering this slight is too childish.
They leave the restaurant and promise to keep in touch. As her limo prepares to leave, Roberta asks if her mother ever stopped dancing. Twyla shakes her head and asks if her mother got well. Roberta smiles sadly and says that she didn't.
Twyla thinks to herself how Roberta messed her head up with that Maggie stuff. Would she really forget that?
Analysis
We might as well get one of the most conspicuous aspects of this story out of the way first: the story does not explicate which one of the girls is white and which is black. This is often what critics focus on in their analyses of the work; we will look at it as well, but there are numerous other ways to approach the story.
To begin, “recitatif” is the French word for “recitative,” which refers to a reading aloud of something, or a listing/reporting of something, or having the quality of a recital or a vocal style where the text is pronounced in the rhythm of natural speech with a slight melodic variation. All of these apply to the story, for it is Twyla’s telling of what happened to her and Roberta, and it also has a structuring that is akin to a musical piece with its sections, ebbs, flows, and quick, rhythmic pace.
From the beginning, Morrison establishes that this piece is about both race and gender, but numerous other themes come into play: memory, shame, trauma, childhood, mothers, and daughters. The story is told by Twyla, and it seems to be told to someone who is physically present. There is an “overtly dialogical” framework to the story, as Lesley Larkin writes: “Oral in tone, vocabulary, and structure—and signaling orality in its title, which refers to an operatic form of talk-singing.” It is assumed that if this is truly the case—that Twyla is telling someone this—then they know exactly what race she is by looking at her. And if that is indeed true, then is only the reader who doesn’t know, forced to constantly think about race yet at the same time abandon conclusions and certainty. Twyla herself “frequently comments on racial difference” but also “disavows the social relevance of race,” and sometimes she makes comments that are “transracial,” as with comments about the Chinese chauffeur. Morrison, Larkin notes, “risks its effectiveness upon the capacity of any given reader to become vulnerable to its exposure of a contradictory racial ideology.” Certainty and narrative coherence are foreclosed, but it is within the understanding of that fact that the reader can appreciate the story for what it is really about. Critic Juda Barnett agrees, saying the story “asks us to be active and not passive readers” as we work through “our own cultural beliefs and conditioning,” and Jan Furman muses that “Questions beget questions in Morrison’s text, and all require strenuous consideration…she will offer no convenient stereotypes as shortcuts.”
When Twyla and Roberta meet at St. Bonny’s, it is clear that they both come with their own set of beliefs and assumptions about the other race. Twyla admits that her mother said that people of Roberta's race smell funny and don’t wash their hair, and we can guess that Roberta has her own prejudices as well. However, the two girls are able to transcend racial categories while they are in this place. It is, Furman writes, “an unlikely cover of protection for the unfettered intimacy each girl feels with the other.” They both still have mothers and were dumped; they’re the same age, share a room, and are united by the fact that they don’t ask silly questions. Susan Morris writes of the story, “Morrison especially emphasizes the bonds in girlhood as pivotal in the creation of positive identity and in the determination of how women negotiate power. It is together that Twyla and Roberta reject the hegemony of Big Bozo (if only in their privately shared disdain for her), the gar girls, and the ‘real’ orphans.”
The girls are also united in their feelings about Maggie and their sense that their mothers have profoundly disappointed them. Twyla’s mother “dances all night,” which is vague but suggests something to do with sex, and Roberta’s mother has some sort of mental issue which may be exacerbated by religious fundamentalism. Both girls’ households are poor and both have suffered from neglect and loneliness. They do not have real homes, and St. Bonny’s is a poor substitute. Helen Adams Androne sums this up: “Twyla and Roberta are in a home, which is not a home to them; they interact with mothers [Big Bozo and Maggie] who are not in a position to mother them; and they connect to each other, but share only the experience of alienation and rejection.” Their mutual alienation helps to “[conceal] complications of race and class”—until it doesn’t.
Morrison sets up the rest of the story as a series of encounters between the girls as they grow up. The first encounter is set about ten years later. Twyla is working at a touristy restaurant, is dressed very frumpily, and isn’t very knowledgeable about the wider world (as we see when she doesn’t know who Jimi Hendrix is). She also doesn’t seem to know very much about wider racial relations, marveling when Roberta says, “you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was." Twyla responds, “I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then: students, musicians, lovers, protestors. You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly to whites in those days.” She sees a slim pocket of humanity—the radicals, the progressives, and the activists—rather than the reality of things.
Roberta asserts her supremacy over Twyla with the fact that Twyla is serving her, that she is with men, that she is culturally aware, and that she is blithely uninterested in reconnecting with someone like Twyla. Morris explains that Roberta has a greater interest at this point in her life of identifying with masculine power and is quick to “[disavow] her friendship with Twyla, identifying her former comrade as an outsider, an asshole…her former friendship with Twyla is disposable because Roberta experiences more cultural currency by identifying with these various men than Twyla, who represents a vulnerable past at St. Bonny’s as well as a lackluster present at Howard Johnson’s.”
In the next encounter, the women have a few similarities but many differences as well. They are both paragons of heteronormativity in the fact that they are married, identify themselves by their husband’s names, and have children. They have also both elevated themselves in terms of social class; they are no longer poor wards of the state, and Big Bozo would be surprised to see either of them. In this encounter, Morrison begins to weave into the narrative another crucial element: who was Maggie, and what exactly happened to her (and by whose hands)? When Twyla remembers Maggie falling, Roberta corrects her and says that the older girls pushed her and tore her clothes in the orchard. Twyla does not remember this, and Roberta says, “You’ve blocked it, Twyla. It happened.” Twyla is disturbed by this: “Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”
